


the shape smoke takes

by poetic_leopard



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andreil, M/M, One Shot, Shotgun kiss, Shotgunning, andrew's a regular customer, neil's a bartender at eden's, quick self indulgent au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 20:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetic_leopard/pseuds/poetic_leopard
Summary: “Do you want to try it again?” Neil asks.Andrew tips Neil’s chin up, softly prying Neil's lips open with the hilts of his fingers and placing the cigarette in between them. “Breathe it in. Do it slow and make sure it reaches down into your lungs. You will feel it. Here,” Andrew brings Neil’s loosely curled palm up over the expanse of his own sternum and flattens it there with his hand. Neil detects the faint stir of Andrew's heartbeat.“Hold it for five seconds and kiss me.”Neil does as he is instructed, his every thought pirouetting around the phrase kiss me kiss me kiss me.Andrew said it out loud. That makes it real.





	the shape smoke takes

_I want our bodies to be difficult to explain: like the shape smoke takes, its slow ghostly groping. Or like a lapse of memory—scent of eucalyptus after rain._    
  
\- Emily Paige Wilson  
  
+

Neil’s eyes are glued to the man sitting at the table nearest to the bar; dressed as always (like he’s prepared for his own funeral.)

The heavy gleam of a stare, ambling spectrally, giving itself away in its attempts to be inconspicuous. Neil’s fingers grow warm and leave lined imprints on the shot glass he’d been polishing. He has a feeling that his gaze is being carefully returned, somewhere past the foggy algorithm of dry-ice and the pool of flooding customers, all drunkenly swishing and swaying against one another like plastic bags caught in a squall. Their movements erratic and possessed, as if the bass dropped a demon in them.

He catches a quick glimpse of a pale blond head thrown backwards, and the empty glass sure to follow suit. Neil’s stomach erupts with warmth at the sight; as if touched; by something as trivial as a blink.

Neil knows how dangerous it is. If his mother were here, she would strike him in between the shoulder blades, and tell him to snap out of it. His father’s bloodhounds will kill him if they sniff him out. Whether he plays by the rules or not, someday, his past is bound to return in the form of a haunting. The dead always catch up. He may be escaping the clutches of said death, having changed his name and being forced to lie low; working in the flashy wilderness of Eden’s Twilight to keep himself from raising any suspicion and assuming a whole new identity—but, it still feels like being strangulated.

He was offered a new life, the least he should be able to do with it is live a little.

Neil’s spent the past year under the Witness Protection Program, living with a tight leash around his neck in return for that protection. It’s a borrowed freedom, and Neil isn’t sure how long it’s going to last. The sharp, familiar gaze reaches him; burns a hole straight through him. He feels the leash loosening in silent revolt and a relief in his chest like a retreating snake. 

_He's still interested in me._

Neil looks up, just as Roland snaps heavily-ringed fingers in his face. “Hey, Romeo. Stop ogling and start attending. I know he’s cute, but will he still be cute after you’re fired for boning a customer?” 

Roland’s tone is lighthearted as he animatedly twirls a glass of vodka behind his back and expertly tosses it at him. Neil catches it on instinct, before pouring a drink for an eager woman with the foreboding depths of her cleavage propped up against the counter.

Neil offers her a dull, plastic smile as she carelessly waves her credit card in his face. He plucks it smoothly from her fingers before punching the price into the machine and handing it back to her.

Neil finds himself fascinated by this night-time species, this throng of people with dazzling grins, an insatiable thirst for alcohol and fairly inexhaustive wallets. This secret world that exists like a sweet distraction from the frantic city that lies above it. The job is easy enough. He’s worked up a colorful resume over the years, and though the training period was trying, six months in and Neil’s able to tie a cherry stem with his tongue while flinging a bottle up into the air with one hand, and pouring champagne with the other.  

Thrust into eye-contact, flighty feet, glass-shard violence and wrists tilted in precision—the bar becomes a stadium in its own right. Neil has gotten so used to people divulging their life stories to him under the influence; without asking for anything in return, that he almost forgets that the truth often comes at a price.

That is, until Andrew.

“Hey,” Roland murmurs. “Tuck that shirt in, we aren’t barbarians. _Bar-_ barians. Get it?”

Neil slides him a bone-dry look. “No.”

There are two facets of the job Neil could live without: Roland and his shitty puns, and bar dress code. The uniform is far too flamboyant for his tastes. Neil can’t help but feel like he stands out, despite his repeated efforts to dilute himself as much as he can. Every staff member is required to, at the bare minimum, wear eyeliner and body glitter. Something about fitting the customer aesthetic and subliminal sales techniques; as if people actually give a damn whether Neil glitters or not before buying a drink. It doesn’t quite help that Neil is stuck in a pair of unforgivingly tight pants. The bartender’s vest he wears on top of a standard black shirt is heavy over the shoulders and clings to his torso like hide skin, the grating magenta making him feel like some kind of a glorified eggplant. Roland of course, often works shirtless, wearing nothing but an unnecessary and painfully bright tie around his neck. The eyeliner is doable, but the glitter splashing his eyelids and cheeks is rather itchy and unfavorable.

Luckily, Neil usually sweats it all off by the end of a routine shift. Unluckily, it gets extremely hot as the crowds drool in, and Neil hasn’t had a haircut in weeks. They’ve taken on a life of their own at this point and grown out just past his chin. He keeps the hair that will cooperate tied back in a bun, but it still manages to fall apart from friction. Neil would have chopped it shorter if it weren’t for the fact that Andrew seems to like getting his fingers tangled up in it. Now that his protection has been more or less secured, Neil has taught himself to let go of the clutch of contact lenses and hair dye. He’s still reminded of his father everytime he looks into a mirror and cold blue eyes stare back, but he’s still learning. He can’t live his entire life hiding. It’s not worth half the effort that goes into it. There’s also the fact that anyone with a keen enough eye would be able to recognize his frail disguises with no trouble. If he has no choice but to hide, maybe he should do it in plain sight.

It isn’t until the cocktail crowd clears up a little that Neil’s eyes gravitate to him again. This time, Roland’s gaze follows. “Can we share him? He could be my type. He’s a little short, but _look_ at that body, and he’s got that whole dead-inside, estranged bad boy vibe going on. A mysterious hunk with definite chances of a damaged past. They’re usually really hot in bed. Kinky, too. That is, once you endure the tragic backstory, but it's worth it. Trust me. ” Neil can practically see the thirst building in Roland's eyes and alarms sound off in his head.

“When he returns for a refill, I’ll be the one to serve him.” Neil isn’t sure if his voice sounds unnaturally gruff, or if he’s just imagining things. By his side, Roland pouts. “You never let me have any fun.”

“Sink your dirty claws in someone else,” Neil snaps, without sparing his coworker the attention he so craves.

“Uh oh,” Neil hears the grin in Roland’s voice before he realizes the insinuation it carries. “Threat Level Midnight.” Neil ignores him in favor of frothing at the mouth as Andrew begins to amble over, but now Neil’s caught up in the way the strobe lights limn the sharp length of his jawline, like the edge of a blade. In a millisecond, Neil’s caution furls into a disbelieving and growing fascination. Maybe it’s because he’s spent so much of his life in the shadows—but he’d convinced himself long ago, that he's incapable of conceptualizing notions of butterflies & pounding heartbeats & urges beyond that of the animal.  

Andrew parks himself right in front of Neil and swirls a vague finger at his empty tray. “Hi,” Neil’s voice trembles like a short circuiting wire, his hands reaching for the faucet. As he watches the gold liquid sloshing around in it, he puts every remaining ounce of effort in trying not to think about the places where Andrew’s lips met the rim of the glass.

Andrew slants an intent look his way. “When do you get off?”

Their eyes meet, and Neil’s anxiety ebbs away, transforms to a solid state of certainty. “That’s up to you.”

Roland’s lips curl up into a suggestive smirk. “Get out of here, you two. I’m practically suffocating in the fumes of your oh-so-sexual tension.” Andrew does not acknowledge the comment, but Neil turns his head. “My shift is still—”

“I’ll cover for you tonight, but you owe me one, Foxy.” Roland had taken to calling Neil that, solely because he turned up to work in a graphic t-shirt with a cartoon fox on it _one_ time—and that had only been because Stanley had picked it for him. It isn’t long before Neil finds himself on Andrew’s solemn heel as they head down a dimly lit hallway. The smoking zone allows for just a little more room than an airport bathroom stall. It’s a small, airy balcony that Neil often takes the liberty to close off to the general public. This is not the first time Andrew and Neil have ended up here together, and it won’t be the last, but tonight feels different.

Tonight feels like a confession.

Andrew clambers onto the edge and settles down with his knees drawn up to his chest, and his back against the cold wall. Neil joins him, a leg dangling loosely on either side. There’s rain trapped in the air, and the clouds hang like blemishes yet to burst, a humid breeze that preys on skin. The steady trickle of dull music springs up from the ground beneath their feet, all too easy to compare to a heartbeat. Neil finds himself inexplicably drawn to Andrew, pulse thrumming like rippling water.

Andrew produces a pair of slightly bent cigarettes out of his back pocket and hands one to Neil. At his appraisal, Andrew leans in and bunches a fist in Neil’s collar. “Your shirt reeked of nicotine last week,” he explains, and lets go; even though Neil doesn’t want him to let go.

Andrew lights them, and Neil accepts his without a thought. The pure orange flame glows in the night like a rescue flare. Andrew’s cigarette slips effortlessly in the hollow between his lithe fingers, as he places it, like the barrel of a gun, to his mouth. Something craved and immediately lost in the thoughtless routine of the movement.

(They are caught up in this dance, in this game, in this ritual. Neil spoke his first truth in years, out loud in some back alley under a bleary moon, staring softly into a disenchanted pair of honeyed eyes, his words a relief and an invitation; spilled into Andrew’s open mouth; his chest soaring with quiet sounds of touch and need and want—all words that bloomed like roses along the thorny stems of resolute promises. Neil has never been interested in another person before, not like this. Even as his toes itch with the whim to run, his ribs burn for more, more, more. This is something he wants to hold onto. Does that make him selfish? Does that make him greedy? Does he care?)

“You’re staring,” Andrew says, watching the distant highway lights, the predictable performance of miniature cars snaking past narrow roads in a gentle, vein-like flow. Low sounds of traffic popping and fizzing far away from where they are. “Did you notice me watching you?” Neil knows the answer, but maybe he can trick himself into taking a confirmation as a promise. “I could barely focus on my job, you know. It’s starting to become a real problem.”

“Your problem,” Andrew corrects, and Neil smiles, cigarette flickering in a suicidal haze between his fingertips. “What’s one more problem to add to my multiplying list?”

Andrew falls quiet, and Neil chews on his bottom lip nervously. That’s a new feeling. He's spent a laughably large portion of his life in acute danger, and now he’s on a nightclub rooftop, growing nervous over something like this. Growing nervous over _someone_ . Curious, too. Neil's mother used to say that learning about people will do him no good. _Do you bother to learn the name of every road you tread on, to get you where you need to go? Of course not._

He doesn’t care. He’s hungry to know—every conceivable thing, hungrier more, for what’s invisible. The reason for the black cloth that veils Andrew’s forearms, the reason for the technicolor bruises he wears around his knuckles, the reason why he understands Neil, on a seemingly molecular level— without a morsel of question or concern. 

“When did you start smoking?” Neil inquires, to which Andrew only blandly says, “You do not get an answer out of turn.” Neil frowns. “How about a bonus round?” When Andrew says nothing, Neil sighs and meets the other man’s eyes. “I do actually want to tell you something, and you can have this for free.” Andrew nods, before tilting his chin and taking a lengthy drag.

"Andrew-"

Neil hesitates, throat closing up at the sight of the muscles working in unison under Andrew’s neck and making a blue vein strain in result. Andrew exhales with the same efficiency, plumes of smoke exiting his lips like fluid ghosts, leaving him in search of the light.

“This… whatever it is we’re doing. It means a lot to me. I’m not used to having desires, or being attracted to other people. I didn’t even think I was capable of anything like it. You make me want to be something other than nothing. You… You don’t have to answer. I just wanted you to know that.”

Cool fingers close around his neck. Neil’s body is slack with notions he’s grown weary of trying to comprehend, notions bigger than the both of them, bright and wide as rivers. Neil’s attention flickers to the rapidly dying cigarette—and why does it feel like it’s burning him down with it?

“Did I ask for a reason?” There’s a stray ringlet of blond hair interrupting Andrew’s eyes. The urge that dawns over Neil is heavy and explorable, but it’s only when Andrew does not back away, that Neil raises his thumb to gently brush it off, tucking it as far as it’s willing go, just above the slender curve of his upper ear. “You asked for the truth.” Neil says, hand falling into his lap in between them; lest his touch mistakenly linger.

“The truth has its limits,” Andrew’s face is close and not close enough. Neil wants him so close that he can longer tell their bodies apart.

“Mm,” he mutters, absently; skin hot from the humidity or maybe from the need to be touched—not just any need. The need to be touched by Andrew is different—but maybe it’s more than different, something too sacred for words. It's not a purely sexual feeling, it's a certain, overwhelming sense of safety (a notion as unfamiliar as the surface of Mars). Safe. Somehow... Andrew makes him feel _safe_.

“How do you know?”

“Because you seem to have none. Come here,” Andrew’s fingers against the nape of Neil’s neck are shaping; guiding, as he gently pulls Neil towards him and picks the half-exhausted cigarette from his hands, before flicking it away. “How wasteful,” Andrew says, tone tinged with the palest hint of disapproval, while his lips part in earnest. “I need the smell, but I don’t really hold a desire to smoke it.” Neil admits. Andrew shoots him a hard glare, and it feels, for a moment, as though there is nothing in between them—not even air or moonlight. Neil can’t look away from the face of the man he has been kissing in silent corners for six months. He can’t quite keep his lungs from pooling either, like light through a doorway.

“Yes or no?” Andrew asks.

Neil’s answer is an incontrovertible _‘yes’_ gasped out like a dying man’s final wish.

There’s a sudden look behind Andrew’s glassy eyes, and maybe Neil is just seeing what he wants to see, or maybe not. Maybe there was a shock of increible feeling that momentarily eclipsed Andrew, before passing as swiftly as it had arrived. Then again, maybe it was just a smoke-induced hallucination.

Andrew draws closer and Neil stares at the way his cracked and peeling lips navigate around his cigarette, how his fingers tremble without volition. Andrew watches him back; closely. Neil is unsure of the steel expression betraying nothing; but the flicker of his eyelids suggest he is furiously muling something over, something clearly substantial.

Andrew lets out a preparatory breath, before taking one of Neil’s hands with his free one and placing it over his shirt, just beneath his ribs. The world shivers and Neil’s pulse rings out like a snare-beat. This is the first time Andrew has ever allowed him to touch him like that. To touch him somewhere below the neck. Neil finds himself suddenly overwhelmed with more gratitude than he can convey in the involuntary twitch of his fingers against the worn fabric of Andrew’s shirt.

Andrew makes it a point to keep a firm hand wrapped around Neil’s wrist; now pressed into his diaphragm, before he inhales, deeply. Their gazes are rapt on one another. Beneath the scar-ridden skin of Neil’s fingers, Neil can feel the conscious rise of Andrew’s chest, the strong muscles expanding beneath his stomach, the lick of heat as Andrew's lips slide open to meet his own and he pours his breath into Neil’s mouth. Momentarily suffocating; dreamy. Libation-spill.

Neil’s eyes fall closed.

The back of his throat scalds and he has to repress the urge to break into a coughing fit, but then the discomfort passes, to be replaced with an indelible need. Even the smoke escaping between them seems to linger reluctantly against their mouths, and then everything within Neil returns to the eager slide of Andrew’s tongue. A gasp of pleasant surprise and a soft scratch of teeth and delicate devouring. Neil’s hair coming undone, his grip on Andrew’s shirt growing more faithful, their breaths rattling out heavy and indulgent.

Neil’s mind mimics a blank slate, Andrew’s breaths run through him. His free hand slips into Andrew curls. He does not tug or disrupt, just holds on for some sense of an anchor and Andrew’s palm latches harder onto Neil’s neck, a finger twisting a loose strand of hair. Just as Andrew begins to draw away so that they can catch their breaths, Neil tugs at his lower lip and pulls him in once again. The smoke is long lost to the whims of air. Neil can feel the way Andrew’s stomach contracts with the sudden gesture, how his body falls slack as if aching to be reshaped, the pronounced jut of his neck. This time, Andrew rips himself away and takes Neil’s lower lip between his fingers, pinching them together in feigned annoyance.

They’re tangled together like a pair of wrinkled clothes on a washing line. Neil’s heart pounds dizzyingly. Andrew’s eyes slant lazily and take on a starry glaze, a consequence of a kiss shared like smoke and digested.

Andrew’s cheeks are red and raw with stray constellations of sticky flecks.

“I'm sorry I got glitter all over you,” Neil hums, unapologetically.

Andrew blinks a sparkling speck out of his lashes. "Liar."

"I've never kissed someone like this before."

"I can tell."

There's a pleasant halo of warmth spreading around them now. Neil pushes his hair back from his face. "You're really good at that."

(A perfunctory pale stare.) “You claim to hate it yet you consume like a junkie.”

(More importantly,) Andrew hasn’t dropped Neil’s wrist yet.

“I think I could get used to smoke as long as it comes from your lungs.” Neil grins. Andrew shoots him an unempathetic look, but it holds no bite. He looks so young all of a sudden, with glitter dust highlighting his features and Neil's hand held to his lungs, standing as a counterweight to the fumes.

"102%."

"What does it signify?"

"The likely chances that I will hurl you off this ledge to your untimely death."

“Before you kill me..."

"Do you want to try it again?” Neil asks. Andrew tips Neil’s chin up, softly prying Neil's lips open with the hilts of his fingers and placing the cigarette in between them. “Breathe it in. Do it slow and make sure it reaches down into your lungs. You will feel it. Here,” Andrew brings Neil’s loosely curled palm up over the expanse of his own sternum and flattens it there with his hand. Neil detects the faint stir of Andrew's heartbeat. “Hold it for five seconds and kiss me.” Neil does as he is instructed, his every thought pirouetting around the phrase _kiss me kiss me kiss me._  Andrew said it out loud. That makes it real.

That makes it a promise.

Neil’s hand creeps up Andrew’s chest and locks around his neck. He leans in and Andrew’s mouth falls open invitingly, swallowing the smoke that seemingly travelled light years to reach him.

They’re still kissing long after the smoke has dissipated and their mouths are sore and Andrew’s cigarette has died out in his hands. An airplane grazes the night sky overhead, drowning out the consequences of body heat and the sound of hitched breaths and transparent bodies colliding; like a car crash in the dark.

When they finally break apart, Andrew has glitter sprawled over his nose and Neil’s body is an ocean.

“Fuck,” Neil breathes. “Andrew, you’re amazing.”

Andrew blinks at him, expression steady, chest still heaving from the aftermath. “Don’t say stupid things.”

“I mean it,” Neil insists. “Thank you for…” He fumbles over the words for a moment, unsure of how to put a feeling so massive into a weak network of words. So he reaches out for Andrew's shoulders instead, but the gesture hangs in question. The delirious feeling of fingers digging into the soft skin of his inner forearms, and tracing back. “Shh,” Andrew moves smoothly, like the start of a flame, and then he has Neil pinned down, the weight of a knee digging into his chest, and an arm, coiled over his side as counterweight to the ledge. Voice tender. _“Stay.”_

“Will you?” Neil asks, breath thin and collapsable.

The longest silence in the universe.

“I am not going anywhere.” Andrew’s tone is perfectly dry, but it conceals open wounds. Wounds Neil wants to fill with kisses and shared cigarettes and a heady rush of safety.

The sort of imagined, persistent safety found beneath blankets after midnight, at the bottom of cardboard boxes, along a line of streetlights.

Neil smiles—big and genuine. “Me neither.”

Neil wants to see Andrew. Again and again. Why? Because of the way roofs cave in to mounds of snow, because of how a hand can be transformed by the simple act of touching another hand, because of a dry spell in the tropics, because of alcohol warming a system, because of the blood spoiling almost every single one of his shirts; the smell of nicotine. And the way that the world feels calmer; less angry, less out to get him. The way their friction reinvents hope and blocks out both sun and shadow. Because he does not want to live like the dead when he's not dead yet. Because Andrew’s breath tastes like a promise. Because he wants to be selfish and brazen and in love with something he can’t understand (not yet).

Because Neil is tired and everything hurts and he just wants to feel something good. Because Neil could choose to run, like he always does, but he doesn’t. Not tonight. Because living like that doesn’t mean a thing.


End file.
